Nexus for the musical endeavors of John Beauchamp

Stories 10th Anniversay

03/02/2016

I know, its been a long time. The website needs a graphic update badly, the new album needs to come out, as a music artist outside of an occasional update on my sound cloud I have no public presence. But that’s okay. A lot people ignore the reality of finances, home degradation, keeping a steady job with hope to have money for a retirement. And musicians especially with the whole live for the now, make poems of the past, and ignore any future outside of the day attitude.

I didn’t realize Stories was about to hit a 10 year mark until Dave, the guy who did the artwork, asked me if it had really been 10 years.

Stories is kind of my bastard child truth be told. In the midst of Ant-Zen and Coldmeat fandom, I really wanted to make a noise album. And I really wanted to make a soundtrack more than anything.

At the time I was playing guitar for Axis and didn’t have much say outside of some of the guitar parts I could wear Steve down enough to let me change. I think it was really this album, as much as I don’t think it was to Steve or Trent’s taste, that finally irritated them enough to let me write more material for Axis.

I wrote out this short story. Well, maybe “wrote out” is a bit generous. It was more a small cast of ideas serving as characters that was thrown through a series of events. More a list of content and events than actual written story. I talked with Dave a decent amount about it and the art he produced was actual scenery from the story.

The whole album started with an instrumental version of Sub-Ojec. Empty was an evolved version of a tune I made in high school I called Empty Creation. I suppose there is theoretically a cassette tape out there titled “Mechanical Savior” that would have this track on it. The whole album was me editing loops I made myself. I think I picked up a Microkorg halfway through which is how Shadows happened. The vocal tracks were very last minute and I had no idea what I was doing.

Emotionally, I hated all the cheeriness fashion people worth in representation of dark so I decided to make something that was truly dark. But at the end of the day, fashion is a separate entity from music. Always has been. Its silly I thought otherwise for so long. Don’t believe me? Ever see a woman in boots, a leather top, and a leather cowboy hat, think she’s a goth, and then find out she’s actually going to the cowboy club? Yeah, and that’s just an easy example.

I keep debating on revising the album. Releasing a non-vocal, remastering possibly rearranged version (also avoiding paying to use Que Sera again). I suppose that would mostly be for me, but then again, that’s what this project has always been about.

Truth me told, left to stew in thought without revisiting, I don’t like Stories much. But if I turn it on there are some aspects I’m really proud of. There’s a lot of progression and change in Box from ambient noise intro, to train, to weather fall. Empty has this wonderful exploratory mood that has a nice bass to it (which desperately needs a limiter or something). Eat is this wonderfully evil noise club song that has too long of intro. I’m still proud of those drums in Shadows. Soft came out exactly as I envisioned it which doesn’t happen often. Gunjazz shows a little shredding and was a fun experiment with bullet samples I found on the internet. Paths wasn’t really realized but man I’m proud of that redo I did of it on the C/Fe Sampler, one couldn’t happen without the other. Que Sera has some great ambient noise in it, along with a character death (the last character alive in the story by the way, spoilers!) that I think was communicated pretty well with noise and samples. And Ages I would probably shorten, spice up a little, and use as an intro to a live set if I ever fancied being a performing artist again.

There you go, too many words about things you probably didn’t need or want to know. These albums are unabashedly me. And I’m glad I did Stories even if marketing wise its a bad idea to keep it out there.